Filmed in widescreen Toeiscope, this low budget gem manages to cram approximately 2.4 metric tons of fun into a 73 minute bag. If some drive-in movie distributor like New World Pictures or AIP had bought the rights to this back in the day, this could have become a mainstay on those weekend SF and horror movie showcases like Ghoulardi or Svengoolie (or the local equivalent from wherever you happen to live). This was a joint project with Love & Care, a relatively new group that has been subtitling Shotaro Ishinomori's JAKQ (a longtime favorite of mine) as well as other cool live-action shows like Turboranger. Angel from L&C contacted me earlier this year and asked if I could help them find a raw source for this movie, so they could subtitle it for the 50th anniversary. I remembered that there was a custom subtitled DVD of the film floating around the trading circuit about seven or eight years ago, so I e-mailed various other subtitlers and video traders to see if anyone had it in their collection. Big thanks to Kaiju from Hi no Tori Fansubs for hooking us up. I've done some joint projects with them before, like Dororo (since cancelled after the official streaming and DVD releases), and the P Productions failed pilots for Jaguarman and Leopardman. They've also subtitled some really cool and insanely weird stuff like Fireman, Thundermask, Godman, Tetsujin Tiger Seven, and of course Ishinomori's classic Robot Detective. The script from the custom DVD sub was a little rough around the edges in parts, kinda literal with some rather awkward phrasing. Angel and I gave it a thorough grammatical cleansing; Shourikan provided translation QC, and translated a few missing lines as well. Shonen King wrote a great review of this movie on his Black Sun blog, you can read that here: http://blacksun1987.blogspot.com/2010/05/ogon-bat.html